Sugar Moonlight isn't just a pretty muzzle. She was the lead designer for the Canterlogic Impermeable Psychobarricade Skullcap™ (or "anti-mind-reading helmet" to everypony but the marketing team.)
You would think that Sunny Starscout would want nothing to do with her after restoring magic and reuniting the tribes, especially for some important mission out in the middle of nowhere. But even Sugar's never been able to figure out Sunny, and she's been trying for most of her life.
An entry in Shrink Laureate's G5 Bingo Contest and Bicyclette's Sci-Fi Contest. Tied for third place in the former and winner of the Ivory Cedar Committee Award for G5 Is Cool I Guess in the latter. Bingo prompt deliberately omitted from this description to avoid spoilers.
m.media-amazon.com/images/I/71+xCbwYebL._AC_SL1200_.jpg
Huh. When they say that G5 takes place in the same universe as G4, there's a lot more wiggle room in that statement than one might realise.
Genius!
Feels very Star Trek. I could see Zipp flying high enough to touch the sky in this situation. ST:ToS fans will get that.
Also, small typo:
Tho picturing Sugar pausing to allow a random bear to pass thru gave me a chuckle.
Great work tho! Is love to see this idea expanded on!
11090153
People were already writing those fics about G4, you know.
11090168
True. But G4 never claimed to be a direct continuation of the earlier generations, as far as I know. And I don't think many people were concerned that G4 wasn't maintaining continuity with its predecessors, either.
Okay, whose ass do I have to kiss and how much do I have to pay them to let you write the lore for G5?
11090183
I was more referring to Equestria as we know it being a space colony that forgot that it was one, which I recall as the premise of two completely separate fics, a background detail of two more, and brought up as a possibility for a fifth.
Disclaimer: I haven't actually read this story yet, so if this wasn't the reveal then oops.
You totally need to turn this into the multi-chaptered fic it deserves to be :D
Excellent work, as always.
Minor error, though: you have a line using Sunny's name when I'm pretty sure the action should be attributed to Sugar:
That was a great story! Has been a while without noteworthy G5 fics, thanks for the read :)
You brilliant sneaky author, you! I see what you did there.
Also, awesome.
Dat ending
That's what I thought like what happened to the other creatures
That is also not a good theory about this Pony why she so sparkly maybe one of the crystal ponies ancestors fell in love with an earth pony but I don't know it's a lot of theories to go by
Who was doing the repairs for 200 years if nopony remembers anything.
That's an interesting take on G5's setting. Neat.
Ah, nice, you alluded to this. I love this sort of thing, as you know. Sugar Moonlight is a nice foil to Sunny, and given her heritage and personality, likely a descendant of Sugarcoat. Neat.
See, that's what I kept thinking about that whole shebang--why where they going to such efforts to protect against the other tribes like they could attack at literally any moment, when it was quite plain none of the tribes had made any real contact with each other in more than at least one generation? Especially as we eventually learn that both the pegasi and unicorns really preferred to just stay away than try and attack themselves. It seemed wasteful to put so much time, energy, and resources into preparing for an attack that would never come and they had no real evidence would ever come, really.
Personally, I think Phyllis was just exploiting and playing up the paranoia as an excuse to hock her otherwise mostly worthless products for every bit she could. Flim and Flam would've been proud.
Anyway, as for the real point of the story...well, it's certainly inventive, gotta give it that.
Not sure if the payoff's all quite there for me, but then again, despite me being a long time sci-fi buff who's normally thrilled by prospects like this, I think I'm actually interested in hearing more about the Sugar being a crystal pony and not even knowing it angle. 
(I guess that and the fact I know there are plenty of indications in the movie alone to suggest the G5 is really an in-flight generational ship isn't actually the case and that there are indeed lots of G4 relics hidden all throughout to suggest it is indeed the same planet, but I hate admitting that because it wrecks what's otherwise a very cool idea that I don't want to knock at all
)
Yonada...
The Ark...
Valley Forge...
G5...
11090418
I imagine that if they were able to build a generation ship with enough technology to reach other stars, they would have built their systems with no small amount of autonomous reliability and perhaps self-repair. Hell, probably some form of magical maintenance
11090757
well today was the day that I went on a Wikipedia adventure learning about the film Silent Running which I may have heard of before but never really knew anything about
Well that was a cool story. Hopefully it has a better ending than Halo 1 i.e. no flood lol. I would reference other Halos but I've only played the first one. Although I do have an Xbox 360 someone gave me I really should find some chords for it and see if it works I hear the new Halos pretty good too
I was drawn in by the incredible characterization of a yet unknown character, continued to be sucked in by the fascinating backstory and dynamic with Sunny, and left very wowed and curious by the ending and implied concepts. Would really love to see the idea continued, if you feel so inclined.
Just saw this and it felt relevant somehow.
pbs.twimg.com/media/FHHerLGXsAQtznt?format=jpg&name=medium
11090932
Polish guy here, it was actually an encyclopedia. Also, the phrase "koń jaki jest, każdy widzi" is still used when describing something obvious.
This makes too much sense.
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Glad to know this seems workable.
11090163
With Hitch, you can never be sure...
11090183 11090260
In all fairness, I probably owe Starscribe some credit for borrowing one of his primary plot lines. (The other being "TF/TG isekai." And the two are by no means mutually exclusive.)
11090289
Yeah, this is definitely one of those ideas with a lot more untapped potential. No guarantee I'll actually tap any of it, sadly.
11090340
Thanks for the catch. Both main characters having five-letter names that start with "Su" was a bit of a headache.
11090418
Basically what 11090851 said. The system has redundancies on top of redundancies, plus a meditating alicorn overseeing the whole operation and diverting any major debris that could cause the sort of cascade failure no amount of automation can cope with.
11090613
I hadn't considered it, but Sugar Moonlight being a descendant of Sugarcoat does make sense.
11090756
If anyone asks, one of Sunny's ancestors raided a museum full of Old Equestrian books and artifacts. Argyle never admitted where all his materials came from.
But yeah, most of my G5 stories are desperate attempts to spare some part of Equestria from this disenchanted dark age, to varying degrees of plausibility.
As for Phyllis's business tactics, I blame the shareholders. If she doesn't have something to show off every year, how can they tell she's doing any work?
11090890
No Niven Rings or sapience-consuming horrors here. Not in this corner of the galaxy, anyway.
11090909
Fleshing out a character who did nothing more notable than strut down a catwalk was certainly an interesting challenge. Still, my first story on the site featured Derpy when all we had to go on was Season 1, so it wasn't new territory for me. Pairing Sunny with a pony who has little interest in friendship or history certainly led to an interesting dynamic for the both of them while crafting the story. Glad to hear that worked as well as I'd hoped!
Generation Ships don't need to be because of an apocalypse, might just be a colonization mission...
Probably everyone else is fine back on Planet 1?
...
Shippy a bit. Still haven't watched the movie, shrugs.
11091122
I was actually thinking of the various landmarks that were passed along the journey, but a topic for another day.
Personally I think calling it a "disenchanted dark age" is a bit of an exaggeration, because, sure, the pony tribes divided, but it's not like that's the first time it's happened according to G4 so it makes sense it'd also not be the last given enough time, and it's not like any of the three tribes were really that bad off despite being divided regardless. They all seemed economically, politically, and even socially stable, and all three had shown signs of having advanced in various (though not equal) ways in the time since G4, and managed to free themselves of other certain pesky problems G4 couldn't ever seem to be truly rid of (the windigoes being a particularly excellent example). I mean, sure, I don't want the tribes divided and think they're better off united again too so I'm glad they're making the effort to do so, but...honestly, I think fans sometimes overreact about how "bad" a thing it supposedly was.
Honestly, all the evidence suggests that Twilight's era of friendship quite likely lasted for a fairly long time, as Zipp's airship hangout suggests the "great divide" happened comparatively recently.
Well...
A much better theory than mine of Sugar Moonlight just being vanilla-cherry sprinkled with cinnamon.
Hah! That's certainly one way to explain how G4 and G5's setting exist in the same world. They don't!
11090873
Douglas Trumbull's directorial debut, before he decided just doing the special effects was enough...
Here's to one of the very first background pony fics for gen 5 :)
Isnt this comments section quite the collection of secondary authors?
I love how at the end the grand worldshaking plot twist is treated as little more than a joke. I would've spent at least a thousand more words ruminating and waxing on that. You turned it into a gripe. Stupid backwater asteroid planets. Its little wonder a dozen get blown up every day when they randomly fly off track and ricochet into suns.
Sugar Moonlight... that's a... Sweet name for her ;)
Neat lil' bit of worldbuilding. Could easily build up into a sci-fi epic, but works well with a lot of unneeded questions being left unanswered. The focus was on the interplay of the erstwhile acquaintances, and did a fine job building off the movie and presumed history.
thanks, I hate it :')
I really likedthis. We need more Sugar Moonlight.
I chuckled at the chapter title.
Ah, Pegasus magic in it then... welcome to the new rules of physics Missus Engineer... don't worry, if you are any good you can adapt.
Oh... and avoid any weirdo Earth Ponies if you value your view of the universe as a sensible place... no NOT Sunny, she isn't the right sort of weird. Just stay away from any Earth Pony you can imagine wearing a lampshade while NOT drunk.
Hah! She accidentally isn't utterly wrong about all of that. Their anti-jinx rituals could reasonable be considered creepy, and Bridlewood has enough shade and warning signs to be creepy. As for the spells... give it a few decades after the return of magic, at most, and SOME spells will qualify. Mind control at the least, should be rediscovered by then, and maybe even hatred/fear based magic like Sombra (and Celestia and Twilight) cast.
Well, she knows how to do the requisite sort of lying to write a resume... (MAJOR pet peeve of mine, and part of the reason for my long-term unemployment).
I might or might not edit in further comments as I read.
A great start to a story, unfortunately it ends before it's really allowed to go anywhere.
always do love to see history being done in fics
to mimic a long-ago comment, well, that's an intriguing cutoff...
aww, what a fun little racism
very cute!
well, that's an intriguing cutoff...
now that just raises further questions!
oof, a bit of hubris there!
ooh, like this bit of background pony biography! really does make a lot of sense, and a lot of intriguing possibilities here
haha, nice inversion of Celestia and the other tall-model horses being the only ones with actually horse-like muzzles!
and everything turning out to be a generation ship is a fantastic concept to tie together the very strange incongruousness of the G5 setting, with its absurdly small population sizes and nonsensical technological development. i know that the use of Flurry Heart was due to the prompt, but as a choice it really ties together the themes of this story, with Flurry Heart carrying out the plans of the generation before her, giving the feel of the passing of a torch. not to mention the great payoff to the line about the shrunken horizon, and just being an intriguing concept that raises all sorts of questions about what happened in the time between the series, in general!
the flashbacks to Sugar and Sunny's interactions pre-movie were also great for establishing your version of Sugar's character and the two mares' history, individually being fun scenes that extend what we saw in canon. a thoroughly enjoyable story, thank you for it!
You can has review!
Oh I see your head cannoning that the sparkly pony is part crystal pony? I mean it’s better than saying that the crystal ponies all died off when magic did
11319095
Hey, either she has some crystal ancestry or she goes through a pound of body glitter every day. I don't know what Canterlogic pays their engineers, but the first option seems simpler.
The story didn't go the direction I was expecting at all lmao